A couple years back getting into Turntable.FM was a right of passage. Once you got into the music based social network you could provide the tunes to your friends that were in the room with you. It was a great way to share music and turned wannabes everywhere into mini-djs of sorts. It was really cool and people loved it.
People started leaving the dance floor back in August when the site that saw over 400,000 monthly active users had shrunk to under 90,000 monthly active users, according to ComScore.
In September TechCrunch reported that Turntable.fm had made a pivot to a new live event web platform. Artists go to Turntable’s New York studio/office and perform in front of a green screen. Turntable users pay a minimum of $5.00 to watch the live show and they enjoy it with others in a virtual setting. The artist gets a 70/30 split with Turntable.
The new Turntable gives users a more intimate performance than watching just a live stream of a concert Turntable allows viewers to send pics into the artist using their webcams. The company also aggregates ambient noise, including applause, from all of the viewers. It’s all pretty exciting but doesn’t have the same feel as the original Turntable.
When this new pivot was launched it was unclear whether or not Turntable would keep going in it’s current form or not. On Friday that became clear. Turntable has decided to shutter the original concept to focus more on this live event service.
Turntable posted this on the company blog:
For over 2 years, we’ve improved and evolved the turntable.fm experience. We made rooms expand to unlimited sizes, made thousands of UI improvements, launched GOLD, built a mini-player, designed tons of avatars and listened to our community, trying to make the experience as wonderful as possible. Over those two years, the community has played over 400 million songs in about a million rooms.
As much as we all love turntable.fm, we have decided to shut it down to fully concentrate on the Live experience. It was a tough decision to make because we love this community so much, but the cost of running a music service has been too expensive and we can’t outpace it with our efforts to monetize it and cut costs. If we also want to give Turntable Live a real shot, we need to fully focus on it.
They also gave users instructions on how to download their playlists and use them with Spotify. You can read their entire statement here, and find out about some pretty cool party favors you can take home.
